Police protect Clegg from student kidnappers
By politics.co.uk staff
Liberal Democrat ministers are to be protected from angry protesters by a major security operation at the party’s spring conference in Sheffield.
The deployment of the usual eight-foot high security fence seen at all governing party autumn conferences is being taken as a sign of wariness from leader Nick Clegg, whose Sheffield Hallam seat means he should be relatively popular in the city.
The three-day spring forum, the first opportunity for grassroots party members to harangue their parliamentary party since the tuition fees U-turn, is expected to require a 1,000-strong policing operation.
Around 10,000 student protesters are expected to gather in the city tomorrow to voice their frustrations.
The deputy prime minister also faces a plot to kidnap him from student activists angry at the Lib Dems’ support for increasing the tuition fee cap to £9,000, the Mail reported.
“They apparently want to infiltrate the conference, storm the stage while he’s speaking and spirit him away,” a Whitehall source told the newspaper.
Mr Clegg used his last speech to Lib Dem delegates in Liverpool last autumn to plead with them to “bear with us”, predicting initial unpopularity would turn to respect and then success at the polls in the 2015 general election.
The prospect of a drubbing in this year’s local elections – combined with a potential defeat in the electoral reform referendum on the alternative vote – poses a grave risk, however.
“I’m sure there will be people who want to protest,” he told BBC Sheffield.
“But I hope there will be people heavily voicing their opinions, strongly if they want, inside the conference hall.”
One backbencher unlikely to be positioning himself against the coalition is former chief secretary to the Treasury David Laws.
Rumours are sweeping around Westminster that he could be making a return to government before the first major reshuffle through the creation of a new Cabinet role.
